The Summer We Lost Her Page 28

  Matt picked up his bagel only to have it fall apart in his hand and hit his shirt on the way to the floor. He grabbed a handful of napkins and wiped down his shirt, the carpet. Even more napkins to clean his hands. “Yeah. I think I need a bit of time.”

  If Garth was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Expires at midnight. We don’t want him to walk. . . . Another piece of land’s come on the market on Lower Saranac.”

  “Man, it’s so hot with the lights on, all the people.” Cass fanned her chest with the neck of her sweater. She gave Garth a look. “Were you even here?”

  “You kidding? I was at the back the whole time.”

  “Turns out my grandfather owes all these families money . . . or land,” Matt said. “I don’t even know the extent of it. I have to figure things all out before I make any decisions.”

  “But wouldn’t it be better to settle up from a place of security?” Garth said. “It’s a lot of cash. You could pay back God and still be fine.”

  Certainly he could take the money, then figure out who was owed what. But these people would never be able to buy back their land once it went to a resort.

  “Matty, you need this money,” Cass said.

  “Believe me when I say, Lake Placid has become a buyer’s market catastrophically lean on buyers right now,” Garth said.

  “I have a plan. I have to stick to it.”

  “You’re not thinking straight,” said Cass. “Whatever’s up with these families, it happened a long time ago.”

  “When it happened isn’t the issue.” Jesus fucking Christ. People needed to back off. “I have to do this. Everything hinges on it. Everything.”

  “Cassidy?” Val’s arms were tucked through those of two kids with pale red hair and freckles, in or around their late twenties. “You aren’t going to believe who these two are: Nicholas and Sophia Redondo. Hatch Redondo’s kids. Their father took the photo. Hatch Redondo.”

  “We were so stunned when we saw your book cover online.” Sophia appeared nervous as she took Cass’s hand in her own.

  “Dad would be over the moon right now if he were alive.” Nicholas was flushed. “To see you doing so well—a photographer, no less.”

  “Wow. I don’t even know what to say.” Cass didn’t appear nearly as excited as Matt imagined she should. She looked truly stunned. “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Totally,” Sophia said. “That photo was on our fridge our entire lives. It was like we grew up with you.”

  “He never knew who sent it to Life. He would have had their heads.” Nicholas laughed. “He hated publicity.”

  “How long ago did he die?” Cass asked.

  “About five years ago. He and Mom were hiking in the Andes. Soph and I take care of his estate now. None of his photographs had anywhere near the success of that one. Dad was a total hippie; he didn’t care. It was all about making art. Not selling it.”

  “We’re pretty proud of him. And protective.” His sister winced politely. “We’d really love it if you gave him a posthumous credit somehow.”

  “Well,” Cass glanced at Matt and Val. “Of course, let’s discuss it. I mean, I literally didn’t even know your father’s name. But I’m happy to do whatever it takes to make good, obviously.”

  “Look at this.” Val beamed as they exchanged numbers. “History being made at my little bookshop.”

  – CHAPTER 37 –

  Elise returned to the cabin in a trance. Pregnant. A real, solid, healthy pregnancy—Oliver had confirmed it. She didn’t have to lie down with her feet up or cross her fingers or pray to Mother Nature. She was free to be herself. The bleeding had been from a friable cervix. The baby had been there the whole time. Maybe the embryo implanted late or maybe Elise had been wrong about her dates. Didn’t matter. She was going to have a baby.

  She sat on the back porch and opened every envelope Warren had sent over the years. She’d expected page after page of empty platitudes about silver linings, and how much he missed her, and how much she would love her new seventeen-years-younger half-sister. But that wasn’t what he’d sent at all.

  Every envelope contained a single picture of Elise in his banged-up aluminum fishing boat on “Lake Puddlejump,” really not much bigger than a large suburban pond where he’d taught her to fish—Elise in her boxy red life jacket, Elise piercing a worm with a hook, Elise holding a sandwich crust over the boat’s side to unsuccessfully entice a loon.

  The loon’s call had been their shared magic. Every time you heard it, they’d decided, something wonderful was about to happen.

  She stared at the photos for a while. Then put them away to fill the bath with hot water and lay still until it went cold. Finally, she soaped, shampooed, scrubbed her arms and legs pink with a loofah, and dunked. Climbed out onto the cotton mat, dripping and cool.

  She combed her hair back and secured it at the base of her neck, then examined her face. Skin pulled taught. Eyes wider, somehow. Like the stag, maybe they’d taken in too much. Before pulling on a bathing suit and shorts, she looked at her belly. Was there a slight swell or was that hopeful thinking?

  Gracie would have beautiful news to come home to.

  * * *

  THE LAKE’S SURFACE glittered as she waited on the dock. Coming toward her in a bright red canoe was the man who had promised her the world and then walked away with it. His paddle stroke was as crisp and smooth as it had ever been. He wore a floppy gray fishing hat covered in lures, just like his old blue one. His frame seemed brittle; his shoulders narrower than she remembered. He put up a hand to wave.

  That same toothy grin as he glided close. “Lisey. All grown up.”

  She pulled the canoe perpendicular to the dock and reached for the rope to tie it. “Come. We can sit inside on the porch. I made coffee.”

  He set the paddle across his thighs. “I think better with a fishing rod in my hands. You know that. Hop in.”

  * * *

  SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF Hawk Island, he laid his paddle down beneath the seats and they sat face-to-face. She noticed that the navy-blue polish on her fingers and toes was peeling from when she’d painted it on with Gracie. It meant Gracie’s would be peeling as well. The thought was both soothing and terrifying.

  “Can we talk about what’s being done about her?” he asked.

  She fisted her hands and tucked her feet beneath her or she’d stop breathing. “Give me a minute, okay?”

  “You’re the boss on this.” Warren reached into a rusted coffee tin for bait. Took a stubby worm and pierced it onto the end of a hook. She watched until the worm stopped squirming; he drew the rod back and cast. The hooked worm landed with a plop, then sunk, and the little red-and-yellow bob bounced on the line.

  “You still have the same bait can,” she said, reaching forward to twist the lid back on with a squeak.

  He started to slowly reel in the line. “Does the job just fine.”

  She looked at him. “So did Mom.”

  Hesitation in the rod before he cast again. Another plop. “I deserved that.”

  A seaplane flew low overhead with a deep hum. They both tilted their chins up to watch as it cruised toward the north shore and the mountains beyond. They waited to see if the bob moved at all, and when it didn’t, Warren reeled his line back in to cast again. “You remember when you used to love baiting the hooks?”

  “I hated baiting hooks.”

  “Not true. When you were very small, you insisted on baiting both our hooks. One day you pricked your finger and blamed it on the worm. You thought he had teeth. You were about eight.”

  “Gracie’s age.”

  He shook his head sadly. “Couldn’t believe it when I saw the news. I saw the picture and thought, she looks just like my Lisey.” He jiggled the bait. Waited. Then cast again.

  “You haven’t seen me in a while.”

  Warren reached into his tackle box and pulled out another envelope addressed to her, unsent, and put it in her hands. “Go ahead. Open it.”

&nbs
p; She stuck a finger into the flap and ripped it straight across. Glanced up at him before pulling out the photo. There she was atop Indie, her Grand Prix Kur completed, saluting the judges. It was Tryon, the day she drove up to the cabin. “You were there?”

  “I was. And then I drove up to New Jersey because I thought you might be at Ronnie’s the next morning. I was going to leave this for you, but when he said you’d all come up here . . . I figured I’d stop in on my way home to Vermont instead.”

  “You left the flowers at the wrong house.”

  “I had the right house.” He smiled sadly. “I just lost my nerve and left them at the place next door. Didn’t want to put you on the spot. I figured you’d maybe call when you got them, so I stayed another day.”

  “And then she was taken.”

  “I won’t leave now until you have your little girl back in your arms.” He folded the worm onto itself and pierced it twice to better secure it on the hook. Started to cast and stopped. Looked at her. “Want to try?”

  She took it from him. “So light.”

  “They make them better nowadays. Like most things.” He watched her cast smooth and far. Smiled his approval. “Dads included, I hope.”

  She didn’t comment. Slowly began to reel the line back in. “Remember my old rod? Covered with pony stickers? Gracie is just the same. Stickers all over her crutches.”

  “He a good father, Matt?”

  “The best.”

  She cast again, then shifted to a more comfortable position on the canoe seat.

  “You want to catch a fish, you gotta stay still. Pull up too early and you scare off the fish. Wait too long and your fish panics. You have to time it just right.”

  “Sitting still isn’t my strong point. Don’t think it’s yours either, outside of a rowboat.” Elise reeled in the line all the way. Just as she pulled it up, not twenty feet away, a pair of loons surfaced. They drifted past in their sleek, dark beauty. The male let out a long, haunting cry that bounced off the shorelines.

  They looked at each other. Something wonderful. If only.

  “Loons mate for life,” he said. “I didn’t know that back then.”

  “Probably a topic we should stay away from.” When the hook was out of the water and dripping, she handed the rod back to Warren.

  “Briony finally came to her senses and left me.” He pointed to a scar on his cheekbone. “But not before sending Big-Mouth Billy sailing into my head.”

  “Mom would never have done that.”

  “Your mother was all elegance. She handled my big dreams and lousy follow-through in one manner, Briony handled it in another. Lost my shirt in that divorce. So . . . I’ve decided to relieve women everywhere of my shit and live out my days as a lonely fisherman.” He waited a moment. “Is this a good time to mention that your half-sister wants to meet you? Chloe Diane. I go there every other weekend when Briony is at her boyfriend’s. You’d like Chloe.”

  “We should get back. I didn’t bring my phone.”

  “Like I said. You’re the boss.” He set down the rod and grabbed his paddle, pointed them back toward civilization. “Mentioned I’m staying at a little fishing lodge up on Barrel Bay. Pretty out there, but plenty rustic. No electricity. Outhouses a long walk through the woods. I had to drive into town just to get a cell signal. E-mailed you from outside Starbucks.”

  He dipped his paddle into the water, pulled hard, then turned the paddle away from the canoe without a sound. The perfect J-stroke. “Kostick and Sons Fishing Lodge. Nice enough guy just opened it. Retired. Always been his dream.”

  “Andy just fixed our roof. We know him.”

  “Lives out there in the bush with his granddaughter.”

  Elise thought about this. Why did it sound wrong?

  “Never told me what the story is, why this kid’s willing to live in a place where even the toilets are—”

  She interrupted her father but spoke slowly, confused. “Andy has no family. Matt told me he has no family. We joked about it because of the ‘Kostick and Sons.’ ”

  “Well, I’m only going by what he tells—”

  “Have you seen the girl?”

  “No. She keeps to herself in their cabin most of the time because of all the bears. Has pet rocks, he said. Draws little animal faces on them. I’ve heard her give them hell, though.” Warren chuckled to himself. “Real character. She picks one rock at a time to hug. Teaches them discipline or some such thing.”

  “Dad. Dad, that’s Gracie!” Elise stood, wobbling the vessel side to side. She looked up the lake as if she might be able to see her. “That’s Gracie—the doled-out hugs, the fear of bears. . . .”

  “Sit back down before you sink us! I’ll get us there.”

  “No—I don’t want anyone to see me in the boat. I’ll swim—you follow.”

  “Wait!” Warren braced the paddle across the thwart and leaned his weight over it. Elise dove off the canoe, feeling it rock beneath the balls of her feet as she plunged into the cold, heavy depth of the lake and started to swim.

  – CHAPTER 38 –

  Lake Placid Public Library was tucked away between Main Street and Mirror Lake. White clapboard, with a Norman Rockwell front porch. The place was historically significant: Melvil Dewey himself had been instrumental in the library’s growth, donating newspaper and magazine subscriptions.

  Matt stepped into the comforting fragrance of old books and waxed floors and looked around, his head afloat from lack of sleep. He’d developed a tic in one eye.

  At the microfiche, downing black coffees from a machine, Matt discovered five properties his grandfather had swindled from their rightful owners and managed to come up with some sense of where these families had later settled.

  If there was a chance in hell this would bring Gracie back, he’d hunt down every person his grandfather had even bumped into in a store, shortchanged in a poker game, or cut off in the fast lane of the I-87.

  He rubbed at his spasming lid.

  * * *

  LYMAN WILLIAMS—THE FIRST of that name—rested in North Elba Cemetery on Old Military Road. Matt had bicycled or jogged through it many times when he was younger without sparing a single thought for who might be buried within. Williams’s gravestone was slender and tall. Gray stone, the edges softened by lichen. Along the bottom platform, the name WILLIAMS in block letters. On the face, both Lyman Williams’s name and his wife’s, Hannie Williams, whose headstone matched his. He had died in 1897, Hannie five years later.

  Nate Sorenson was fifty-five when he appropriated the Williams’s land for an unpaid debt of $13,000. Matt tried to imagine the full narrative—what Nate told his wife, what he told Matt’s father, and mostly what he told himself about throwing a hardworking family with two young children out of their home, taking their land, and leaving them without an income.

  A twig snapped behind him. Matt turned to see Lyman.

  “Thank you for coming,” Matt said.

  “He became a sheep farmer,” Lyman said, looking down at the headstone. “Packed up and moved here with his wife and two kids from the city, no experience whatsoever. They bushwhacked their way onto a plot given to them by New York State’s wealthiest abolitionist before the Civil War, then built a cabin out of the trees they’d felled. Gerrit Smith offered land parcels to three thousand black men so they would have the right to vote in state elections, learn how to farm, keep themselves and their families safe from slavery. The effort was called Timbuctoo. This land—it was rocky and treed, the winters were harsh. Not many of the families were able to make a go of it. But mine did. My ancestors sold off part of their original farm plot, but they went on to found a school, a church. And here we are today.”

  Matt recalled the sign he’d spotted as Dorsey drove them through the crowd on John Brown Road. “So that was you accepting an award last week at the old John Brown place? On behalf of your ancestors?”

  He nodded. “Timbuctoo was the reason Brown settled here in the first place.”
>
  The ceremony was to honor the man whose descendants Nate would one day swindle. The sun grew unbearably hot suddenly. Matt rolled up his sleeves. “Your family owned thirty-seven percent of the land I’m selling. There’s no way for me to immediately sever it and give you what’s rightfully yours, but I want to give you thirty-seven percent of my sale price.”

  Lyman said nothing.

  “Your land’s worth a lot of money.” The stretch of wooded shoreline had a sandy inlet and an archipelago of smooth rocks that reached out into the lake; Matt used to hop from stone to stone as a child. But for his grandfather’s greed, it would have been Lyman and Athena who spent their childhoods playing on those rocks. “More than half a million.”

  “I appreciate what you’re doing, Sorenson. But what’s done is done—”

  “I realize it’s nothing in the face of what your family lost. I can’t undo what my grandfather did. Please don’t walk away from this.”

  A crow in a tree cawed. Another answered back.

  “I don’t take handouts.”

  Long after Lyman had gone, Matt continued to stare at the Williams’s headstones.

  – CHAPTER 39 –

  Elise lifted her head from the water a moment, heart hammering, lungs paining. For all the years of wind sprints, of cross-training, of riding until the seam of her briefs cut into her skin and made her bleed, all the mucking stalls until her hands blistered and mucking more stalls until the blisters split, the schooling when it was so cold she had to ride with no saddle, the cold-water bath plunges Ronnie promised would sharpen her focus, the endless push-ups and lunges and power yoga classes that made lying in a grave sound like relief—never had she pushed her body harder.

  The canoe was gliding along behind her. Warren held a hand low in greeting.

  With electric jolts firing from every cell, Elise caught her breath and looked toward the fishing lodge at the shore. It appeared, from the water anyway, to be made up of a main building surrounded by cabins so small they likely didn’t hold more than a bed. About eight or ten of them dotted the piney hillside, looking down at the shoreline. A couple of smaller docks ran perpendicular to the shore, along with one long central dock that had seen better days. Close to the end of the long dock was a dilapidated hut. It wasn’t until Elise swam closer that she caught movement beside the little structure, a flash of blue dress.